Common mistakes

At some point in the late 1990s, web design became "rocket science". It really isn't easy, and there are many opportunities to make mistakes. The advantage of a widely-used system such as the Cal Poly Pomona templates is that most of the mistakes have already been made, and you really don't have to do them over again unless you really want to. We've listed a number of them below, and will continue to add to the list.

Forgetting that it's a template, not a web page

People who are unfamiliar with Dreamweaver templates may attempt to modify a template and save it as an .html file (rather than applying it to a file, the ordinary Dreamweaver approach). This can even work (although it often results in broken image and stylesheet links; see below), but the resulting site will behave strangely for people using either Dreamweaver or Contribute.

Even experienced Dreamweaver users can forget that they are editing a template, and add editable content to a template page.

Broken links among the components

Every template is linked to stylesheets and images, and the stylesheets are in turn linked to other stylesheets and images.. Dreamweaver adjusts all the links when templates are applied, and when files are moved, but editing the files outside of Dreamweaver can result in broken links, most apparent as unstyled web pages missing their images. It is certainly possible to move or edit pages outside Dreamweaver, but please take care to correct the links as necessary

Too big! Oversized content

Because of the way the narrow and wide_content templates are constructed, a too-wide object in the content area can expand its width in Internet Explorer and force the right column to beneath the content area. Be sure to follow the width guidelines.

Stung by the IE: italics in Internet Explorer

Even if you have checked the widths of all your content, a page might still break in Internet Explorer. Often this will be the result of the infamous italic bug: Internet Explorer adds width to italic text in excess of the actual character count, and if it comes too near the right margin, it may push out the width of the box. The simplest solution is often to edit the text to wrap the last word to the next line.